Components for Decentralized Process-Centered Environments

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A process is a partially ordered set of steps to be followed in developing a software system. Processes may vary across organizations and systems. A process-centered environment provides computer-aided support for a range of project-specific processes. The general goals of research in process-centered environments are to devise useful notations for specifying processes and to investigate ways in which environments may assist users in carrying out processes. The Marvel process-centered environment is tailored by a rule-based process model, where each rule defines a process step and states the condition for initiating the step and the result of finishing the step. The permitted sequencing among steps is implicit in their conditions and results. The environment enforces the specified process and assists users in satisfying the conditions of steps. Recent work has concentrated on concurrency control for teams of users, and on evolution of processes while they are in progress. Both are prerequisites for scaling up process-centered environments. This project addresses four problems; (1) translation of higher-level process modeling formalisms into rules for execution, (2) formal notations for coordination modeling and the interaction of corresponding concurrency control algorithms with process assistance mechanisms, (3) requirements placed on environment frameworks by process and coordination, and possible protocols for interfacing process and coordination components to a range of existing classes of frameworks, and (4) decentralized environment architectures that permits a degree of site autonomy for different process and coordination needs.